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War Secretary Pete Hegseth tore into the Pentagon’s entrenched acquisition bureaucracy in a fiery address Friday, comparing the department’s planning culture to Soviet-style central planning that he says has crippled innovation, risk-taking and the nation’s ability to prepare for war.
Speaking to a group of defense industry executives, Hegseth opened by invoking the specter of a familiar enemy — but quickly turned his critique inward.
“Today, I’d like to talk to you about an adversary that poses a threat, a very serious threat, to the United States of America,” Hegseth said. “This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating in five-year plans from a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents and continents, oceans and beyond, with brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of our men and women in uniform at risk.”
After teasing comparisons to the former Soviet Union and even the Chinese Communist Party, Hegseth delivered his punchline: “The adversary I’m talking about is much closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the process.”
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Hegseth accused decades of War Department policy of being paralyzed by “impossible risk thresholds” and “burdensome and inefficient processes” that have turned the Pentagon into a self-reinforcing machine where “process, not outcomes, matter.”
He argued that previous administrations only made things worse by trying to “go around the process rather than confront it head-on,” leaving both the U.S. military and defense industrial base weaker and slower to adapt. “The institution shapes the individuals as much as the individuals shape the institution,” Hegseth said. “Over time, the prevailing pattern becomes more and more entrenched, risk-averse and immovable.”
Hegseth said this bureaucratic inertia has spilled over into the defense industry itself, creating a system where contractors profit from inefficiency rather than performance. “The defense industry financially benefits from our backwards culture,” he said. “Schedule overruns, huge order backlogs and too-predictable cost increases become the norm.”
The secretary warned that the result is “an absence of urgency, a fear of innovation and a fundamental lack of trust” between the Pentagon and its suppliers — precisely the kind of dysfunction, he argued, that America’s adversaries exploit.
“Our military and our taxpayers need a defense industrial base that it can count on to scale with urgency in a crisis — not one that is content to wait for money before taking action,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth’s remarks are part of a broader push within the administration to accelerate defense acquisition reform, streamline contracting, and restore what he has called “wartime urgency” to the Pentagon’s day-to-day operations.
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The Army has become the Pentagon’s test bed for acquisition reform, rolling out some of the most aggressive efforts to speed up weapons procurement and cut through the red tape Hegseth blasted in his remarks. Over the past year, the service has begun dismantling decades-old program structures that officials say are too rigid, too slow and too far removed from the battlefield.
Senior leaders have unveiled what they call a “transformation strategy” — a plan to streamline the Army’s force structure, slash redundant oversight, and reform contracting practices that have kept modern systems from reaching soldiers on time.
“The Army is running as fast as it possibly can to try to reinvent itself, to be ready for modern warfare,” Sec. Dan Driscoll told Fox News Digital previously. “They’ll do a lot of that outside the traditional procurement process. That flexibility lets them innovate and test at a speed that’s just really hard to do in the conventional force.”
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The Army and Department of War more broadly are emphasizing a “commercial-first” approach: using commercial technologies and industry models instead of bespoke, highly custom, defense-unique systems where possible.
“They’ll do a lot of that outside the traditional procurement process. That flexibility lets them innovate and test at a speed that’s just really hard to do in the conventional force,” Driscoll said. “They basically just use their corporate credit card to go online and purchase things to test, and they will find what works.”
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